NBN Co Blog

In the next 10 years, the NBN is planned to connect about 13 million premises across the country with a combination of fibre, fixed wireless and satellite. But of these, nearly two million premises are yet to be built!

Recently, the NBN Co Discovery Truck visited Maitland, NSW, and quite a number of builders and developers working on a number of major new developments in the area came through to learn more about the NBN.

Matthew Schwabrow, New Development Account Manager, came along for the day and gave us some key insights into the rollout of new developments:

At least once a day, someone comes up to me in the NBN Co Discovery Truck and asks to know why we need to build the NBN when we can all just use Wi-Fi!

This is, in my mind, a fair and logical question given almost everyone is using devices that are wireless now - including tablets, smartphones and laptops.

So why are we building a "fixed line" optical fibre network?

Millions of years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth until their historic extinction at the end of the Mesozoic era.

Personally, I'm thrilled I don't share the sidewalk with a Tyrannosaurus Rex but did you know that several species of birds survived the extinction event 65 million years ago, and modern birds today carry on the dinosaur lineage?

This adds a whole new element to the birds that perch on the railing of the NBN Co Discovery Truck, tweeting dangerously as we discuss the science of optical fibre inside.

You might be wondering why I am writing about dinosaurs - it's because of some really awesome new ways museums are bringing dinosaurs and palaeontology to life for young students via high-speed broadband.

When the NBN Co Discovery Truck pulled into Darling Harbour in Sydney for CeBIT, we knew it would be one of the more popular exhibits, but we had no idea just how popular!

We had groups of 15 or more people coming through the truck every two minutes for almost three days solid to see the NBN equipment, learn about the rollout plans and ask their curliest questions.

One of the interesting questions asked by several visitors was whether the NBN has resilience (or, in telecommunications jargon, "redundancy") built in to deal with parts of the network being damaged - for example, if someone ploughs through a high capacity fibre optic cable on their tractor by mistake.

The NBN Co Discovery Truck recently visited Kiama on the south coast of NSW where some communities are already connected to the NBN via fibre optic cable.

We were blown away by some of the changes taking place in the local community.